Socialisation

Abstract

Newcomers to an industrial organisation bring with them a ‘presenting culture’:¹ an understanding and an evaluation of their position in the world, a means of interpreting their environment, a patterned set of predispositions to certain forms of behaviour. As the newcomers take up positions in the organisation, this presenting culture is modified to a certain degree, to take account of the existing cultural patterns in the organisation. However, these cultural patterns are not immutable, and are themselves changed by interaction with the new ‘presenting cultures’.² These two processes of change in the presenting culture and change in the organisational culture are continuing processes which accompany the development of both the individual and the organisation for a long time, but a significant portion of the changes takes place during the early periods of contact between the two.